Wireless phones, pagers, camcorders and other hand-held electronic devices having large power requirements have been rapidly miniaturized. To meet a market for ever-smaller, hand-held, power-intensive electronic devices, certain trade-offs are made by the designer to reduce battery size and delete features that may be favored by only small portions of the market. For example, newer cellular phones provide sufficient "standby time" for most subscribers, but only a limited amount of "talk time." Heavy users are expected to carry spare batteries and swap batteries when the first battery unit expires. To use certain other features, such as a hands-free speakerphone, the subscriber is expected to return to his or her vehicle.
The trend is to smaller radiophones (and similar devices) and multi-band and multi-mode communications. There has arisen a problem of short battery life due to the size limitation. Manufacturers are designing in reduced amounts of useful battery life to keep the size of these devices small. As of the time of writing, the currently available models include the Motorola StarTAC.TM. series, Ericsson 700 series, Qualcomm Q.TM. series cellular/PCS phones, the Sony D-WAVE Zuma.TM. CDMA phone and the Phillips Genie.TM. TCD 828 GSM phone. For multi-mode, multi-band operation, battery life is an even tougher issue to address due to the complexity of the circuitry and the electrical power required by the on-board digital signal processors which typically are in multi-mode or multi-band phones.